


there's a ghost in my lungs

by sparxwrites



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Backstory, Body Horror, Character Study, Isolation, Memory Loss, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 19:43:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3459536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not the lack of light that’s a problem. They learn to deal with that well enough, eyes slit-pupiled in the gloom to catch the small sparks of light from the torches they ration carefully and the flickers of the machines they run on and off. Their eyes flash reflective with it. No, they can manage without the light. After all, they’re a creature of darkness and shadows at heart, a creature of lurking and hiding and skulking. Darkness is hardly an issue.</p><p>It’s the <i>dripping</i> they can’t stand.</p><p>(Some musings about Lying's time in the well, and the consequences of it.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's a ghost in my lungs

**Author's Note:**

> fluxy-rythian asked for something about lying getting out of the well, ages ago, when prompts were open. it's sort of languished half-written on my hard drive since then, and turned more into a weird character-study-slash-backstory thing. mostly written before lying did the whole backstory episode and wrote a thing about it, so if some of it doesn't tally all that well, that's why. title taken from dragon age's version of "i'm not calling you a liar" by florence + the machine.
> 
>  **warnings** for body horror, isolation, injuries, drowning, distorted reality, mentions of murder and cannibalism... nothing massively explicit, really, pretty much on the same level as witw itself.

It’s not the lack of light that’s a problem. They learn to deal with that well enough, eyes slit-pupiled in the gloom to catch the small sparks of light from the torches they ration carefully and the flickers of the machines they run on and off. Their eyes flash reflective with it.

No, they can manage without the light. After all, they’re a creature of darkness and shadows at heart, a creature of lurking and hiding and skulking. Darkness is hardly an issue.

It’s the _dripping_ they can’t stand. Endless, irritating, _random_ – an echoing drumbeat that drives them to distraction with its lack of pattern.

At first, they deal with it. They talk to themself, to their machines, to the tiny bugs and wriggling creatures that scuttle over the floor and disappear into dirt-packed walls and cracks in the stone. When they run out of things to talk about, they sing. When they run out of songs, they scream, shout, yell wordless rage and fury and listen to the noise echo weirdly in the enclosed space.

Their voice goes soon after that, hoarse and rasping until it fades away, and they’re left in silence. The dripping is still there.

For a while, even that’s okay – they’ve got the machines to make noise, grinding and clattering and hissing and scraping. They start leaving them running all the time, even when they don’t need to, just to try and block out the _drip_.

And then the accident happens.

They’re not terribly clear on what happens. There’s an explosion, they think, heat and pressure and overload that rips a jagged and aching hole of blackness in their memories, tinged grey with shock. A roar of sound so loud it leaves a hollow ringing in their ears. Light so bright it physically _hurts_.

Everything whites out for a while.

When they come back to themself, they’re crumpled against the base of a wall and their well is in _ruins_. There are chunks blown out of the walls, doorways covered by impenetrable mounds of rubble, water streaming in from the holes.

The farm’s gone. The power system and machines are gone. The _light_ is gone.

They are still here.

For a long while they lie there, in the wet and the darkness and the steadily-rising water, and cry. Arms around their knees, they curl in on themselves and choke on the quiet sobs that echo too loud in the empty space, wretched and hopeless and more bitter anger than sorrow.

It’s only when the crying finally stops – no energy, no will, the spiked pain in their chest dulled to a hollow, angry _hunger_ – and something still drips from their eyes that they become concerned. They touch one eyelid with tentative fingers, rub the heel of their palm against it, and hiss when their palm comes back streaked with something greyish and glistening in the dark. When they lick at it, copper and salt burns against their tongue.

They wipe all the blood off, meticulous and careful, until their fingers come back clean, though their relief is short-lived. It comes back quickly, too quickly, cold and tacky and smeared in a curve that unevenly lines their eyelids.

It upsets them.

The next day, all the mirrors that weren’t already destroyed in the explosion are shattered. The reflective surfaces are gone, too – glass smashed, sheets of metal and sides of machines scratched and marred so not a hint of a reflection can be seen in them. They don’t remember it happening, don’t remember doing it.

Can’t remember _why_ they did it. They don’t try and fix it, though. Just in case.

They lose their teeth a short while after that, one by one, little specks of white in the darkness where they spit them to the floor. The teeth grow back better, stronger. _Sharper_. They lick over them, cut their tongue on the jagged point of one, and _smile_.

Somewhere in their mind, they think they should be scared by this. They aren’t.

Time passes in the well – slowly or quickly, they have no way of knowing, with no light or sound or growth to track the passing of the days. Their body changes, bones warping and flesh twisting and endless, endless blood soaking into their hair and clothes along with the well water. Nothing else changes. They don’t even sleep much any more, if at all. There’s no way of knowing whether the patches of lost time and darkness are sleep, or something more sinister.

Not that it really concerns them. They have more important things to focus on. An escape to plan, failures to ignore, magic to practice… a steadily growing pile of corpses in the corner that have become their only hope, their only chance at salvation.

Their only source of food.

They tell themselves it’s for the best, for the greater good, that it’s their only option – and after a while, they stop having to tell themself anything. A little while later, and the whispering voices from somewhere just behind them start doing the telling for them, laughter and snatches of song echoing off the stone walls and something uncomfortably close to their own face in the corner of their eyes.

It drives them to distraction, to anger, makes them pour more energy into their studies and their escape efforts. They work without breaks or sleep or anything other than the occasional snatch of empty memory where they’ve lost time. With nothing else to do in the well, it’s all too easy for them to lose themself.

Eventually, inevitably, something has to give.

The anger, the obsession, the restless, ceaseless energy, all mixed with the steadily-rising ambient magic permeating the place – i’s a volatile cocktail, roiling and unstable. All it takes is a snatch of that singing, a glimpse of that face, _taunting_ them, laughing at them and mocking them and making their head ache like a struck tuning fork…

Something snaps inside them, a broken and jagged outpouring of raw power that wells up and shatters outwards, upwards. For a moment, their entire world is white with raw energy, power, _light_ – and then there is nothing.

They come to at the bottom of the well, submerged under the greenish water and slowly drowning. There’s water in their mouth, in their nose, in their lungs, and something deep in their chest _burns_ as they claw their way to the surface. It lights fire in their throat and nose, panic all the way down to the tips of their grasping fingers, because they can’t breathe, they can’t _breathe_ -

Breaching the surface feels oddly like being reborn as they exhale brackish, tainted water in shuddering, choking mouthfuls.

It’s difficult to keep their head above the surface when they can’t exactly tell where the surface is with all their thrashing, water thrown up all around, but they manage it. Dragging themself to the side of the well, to the rough platform they’ve made there, they cough and splutter the remainder of the water from their lungs. It tastes like mould in their mouth, disgusting and slimy, and they spit onto the floor over and over until their tongue no longer tastes of death.

When their lungs are finally free of water and they roll onto their back, gasping, they see stars above them.

It takes them a while to realise that they actually _are_ stars – not a hallucination, not sparks crawling across their vision from the oxygen deprivation. The night sky is above them, vast and bright and more colourful than anything they can remember, and it makes their chest _ache_.

There’s no way up but to climb.

So they climb. There’s something wet and cracking, grinding inside their chest, fingers bent back the wrong way, blood coming from places other than the endless smear around their eyes that they’ve slowly gotten used to – but they climb, because they have no other choice. Or rather, they do have a choice, but the thought of being stuck down in their well for another minute is so utterly terrifying that they can’t even contemplate it.

Hauling themselves over the lip of the well, there’s a teetering second where their grip slips, fingers shaking and wet with blood, the stones slick with algae. The well looms wide and hungry beneath them, endless darkness and damp, and for a second they’re falling, falling-

And then they collapse forward, over the edge, onto the ground. Safe. _Free_. They barely have time to take their first breath of fresh air in centuries, feel the warm, dry dirt beneath their skin, before they pass out.

When they wake up, there is _light_. It hurts, makes their wide eyes and blown pupils ache, and they hiss with the pain of it. Curled in on themself, palms pressed over their eyes to try and block it out, it takes them a moment to register… _everything_.

Grass and dirt beneath them, dry, warming in the slowly rising sun. The smell of trees, flowers, living things. Birdsong and the rustle of bushes. _Warmth_ , despite the fact their clothes are still sodden, clinging to them and dripping slowly. Everything they haven’t had for months, years, centuries, suddenly all around them.

Choking out a noise somewhere between a sob and a giggle, they force their eyes open, ignoring the way it burns through their skull. Colour floods in, colour and _light_ and the vast expanse of the sky, and it’s enough to make them breathless, giddy, with the sheer size and life of it.

For a long, long time, all they can do is stare.


End file.
